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Jim Carroll

Music, Life and everything else

Down With Jazz (and that sort of thing)

Best festival name of the season, hands down. It’s not just pop-trance in the Phoenix Park which has the capacity to have the natives up in arms, you know. Down With Jazz! takes its name from Father Peter Conefrey’s Anti …

Jim Carroll

jimcarroll

Tue, Aug 7, 2012, 09:05

Best festival name of the season, hands down. It’s not just pop-trance in the Phoenix Park which has the capacity to have the natives up in arms, you know. Down With Jazz! takes its name from Father Peter Conefrey’s Anti Jazz Movement from 1934, when the priest and Gaelic League fanatic led a herd of his parishoners down the main stret of Mohill, Co Leitrim on New Year’s Day to protest at “music borrowed from the savages of Africa by the anti-God society, with the object of destroying morals and religion”. It’s quite a yarn and Kieran Sheehy’s brilliant radio documentary does a great job of telling it.